We like to think and talk about strange and excluded things: from ghosts and UFOs to forgotten history and strange beliefs. See below for more details.
We're forteans, we're open minded and we welcome everyone online and at our meetings.
Contact us on forteansociety@live.co.uk

From hoax hip-hop stars and haunted houses to military deception, fake news, cancer myths and a joke that may have started World War III join the London Fortean Society and Conway Hall Ethical Society for an April Fools Day of hoaxing, deceit and unreal things. Some may be charming, others are terrifying. 1st April is the traditional day for hoaxing and japes but deception and deceit riddle everyday news and communication.

On Halloween 1992 BBC1 viewers watch a chilling live
transmission from a haunted house that went terribly wrong.Sarah Greene. Mike Smith and Craig Charles
were terrorised. Michael Parkinson ended the program far worse than that.The drama, depicted as a documentary, was
frightening, controversial and not shown for another ten years afterwards.

Ghostwatch writer Stephen
Volk and director Lesley Manning
show excerpts and discuss the making, impact and influence of Ghostwatch on its
twenty-fifth anniversary.

Orion: The Man Who
Would Be King & The Great Hip Hop Hoax

Jeanie Finlay is an artist and film-maker who creates
intimate and personal documentary films and artworks. She will be telling the
stories of, and showing excerpts from, two of her films: the Bifa winning Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, Panto!,
Bifa and Grierson-nominated The Great Hip Hop Hoax.

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King

Silibil n' Brains. Hadn't seen as much sunshine as they first made out.

From Jeanie’s Director’s statement: “A roller coaster tale
of the Nashville music scene in the wake of Elvis Presley’s death, taking in
deception, a quest for success, a search for identity and ending in brutal and
tragic murder. […] Even if you’ve never heard of Orion, you probably know about
the ‘Elvis is Alive’ myth. What I uncovered was that
the story of Orion is the story of how that myth got started.”

The Great Hip-Hop Hoax

Californian hip-hop duo Silibil n' Brains were going to be
massive. What no-one knew was the pair were really students from Scotland, with
fake American accents and made up identities.

The Hoaxes of Crass: The Thatchergate Tapes and Loving Magazine.

Spend some time with Penny

1980s anarcho-punk band Crass were more than a shouty
protest band. Their 1983 ‘Thatchergate’ tape supposedly caught Margret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan discussing Europe becoming the US’s battlefront against the
USSR and the sacrifice of HMS Sheffield during the Falklands war.

The hoax was a pre-Cassetteboy prank of
spliced tape that the CIA thought was by Soviet 'produced to destroy democracy
as we know it'. The hoax did not set-off World War Three.

In 1981, in the build up to the wedding of Prince Charles
and Lady Diane, Crass convinced the magazine Loving to carry a free flexi disc of the song Our Wedding. Ex-Crass Member Penny
Rimbaud described the lyrics as “frightful, banal shit about the social
fantasy of marriage” that the magazine fell for “hook, line and stinker”.

Join Penny as he discusses these hoaxes.

Fake Cancer Cures and
Anti-Vaccination Myths

The news and internet are forever full of fake cancer causes
and cure offering simplistic solutions to a complex and terrible illness. The
'alkaline diet' can prevent cancer Sugar can cause cancer. A carbohydrate-free
diet can throttle cancer. Homeopathy, cannabis oil and natural remedies can
treat cancer. Household electromagnetic radiation causes cancer.

Vaccination has been hated and feared since at least 1867
and the formation of the Anti Vaccination League and has had a recent
resurgence following the false autism scare of the MMR vaccine.

Where is the truth amongst the myth?

Dr David Robert Grimes
is a physicist and cancer researcher at Oxford University. He was a joint
winner of the 2014 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science.

Magic, Deception and
the Abuses of Enchantment

Mark Pilkington looks at two formerly secret documents,
published six decades apart,

Mark Pilkington, definitely in front of a secret UFO base

that reveal the methodologies of psychological
manipulation and deception practised by American and British intelligence
services. “The Art of Deception, Training for a New Generation of Online Covert
Operations”, an internal presentation for the UK’s GCHQ, was leaked by
whistleblower Edward Snowden earlier this year, while “The Exploitation of
Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare” was published by USAF’s
RAND Corporation in 1950.

The similarities between the two papers demonstrate that
while the world we live in has changed dramatically in the intervening years,
the human mind, and the techniques for manipulating it, have remained very much
the same; both papers discuss the exploitation of belief systems and fortean
phenomena.

Monday, 20 February 2017

7.45pm Thursday 27 April 2017This event has now sold out, sorry. All being well we shall run this event again in the autumn.The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook page
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Haunted Hotel Room by Chris Combe licensed for reuse

How does it feel to live in a ‘haunted home’? How do you negotiate living in a home which might be ‘co-habited’ by the strangest form of stranger?Geographer Dr Caron Lipman decided to find out through a series of interviews with inhabitants of ‘haunted homes’ in England and Wales – all of whom had experienced some form of ‘uncanny’ event.Caron will offer some examples and insights from her case studies, describing how such experiences are interpreted, how far the experience of uncanny events challenges existing beliefs (or non-beliefs) in ghosts, and what these events reveal about the domestic interior.7.45pm Thursday 27 April 2017This event has now sold out, sorry. All being well we shall run this event again in the autumn.The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook page

Sunday, 19 February 2017

7.45pm Thursday 30 March 2017£4 / £2 concessions (Advance tickets)The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook pageThink that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? That Darwin was the first to

put forward a theory of evolution, or that Watson and Crick discovered DNA? Former scientist and editor-at-large of Londonist Matt Brown picks apart some of the best known 'facts' about science, drawing on his book Everything You Know About Science is Wrong. Find out why your kettle never boils at 100 degrees, how no astronaut has ever experienced zero gravity, and several reasons why you may not be who you think you are.

Monday, 6 February 2017

7.45pm Monday 27 February 2017This event has now sold out. We are sorry if you did not get a ticket.The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook pageWithout writing, indigenous elders memorised a vast amount of factual information on which survival depended both physically and culturally: knowledge of thousands of animals and plants, astronomical charts, vast navigation networks, genealogies, geography and geology … the list goes on and on. How did they remember so much? And why does this explain the purpose of ancient monuments including Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Nasca Lines? Can we use these memory methods in contemporary life?This talk will focus on the transmission of scientific and practical knowledge among small-scale oral cultures across the world, drawing on Australian Aboriginal, Native American, African and Pacific cultures. Dr Lynne Kelly, author of The Memory Code, will explain the exact mechanisms used and why this explains the purpose of many enigmatic monuments around the world. We have a great deal to learn from the extraordinary mnemonic skills of indigenous cultures.7.45pm Monday 27 February 2017This event has now sold out. We are sorry if you did not get a ticket.The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook page

In October 2016 the UK was terrorised and fascinated by the Killer Clown craze. Fear of them not only dominated newspapers but crept in to the public consciousness with rumours and stories being shared on social media and in school playgrounds. Scott Wood, host of the London Fortean Society and author of London Urban Legends: The Corpse on the Tube attempts to dissect these clowns to see what they and their myths are made of. He will look at the origins of the scares from hoaxed to guisers to earlier mythical terrors such as Spring-heeled Jack and the Chelsea Smilers.23 February 2017£4 / £2 concessions (Advance tickets)The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX.Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate EastFacebook page